The HBO docuseries "Wise Guy: David Chase and the Sopranos" reveals that HBO only agreed to make The Sopranos after creator David Chase rewrote his pilot script to include actual on-screen deaths, having originally conceived it as "a mob show where nobody got killed" out of habit from years working within network television's restrictive content rules. This last-minute change proved pivotal: HBO, then still primarily known as a premium film channel with only a handful of original series to its name, took notice of the reworked, more violent pitch and greenlit what would become one of television's most celebrated dramas.

Chase first developed the concept in the late 1980s after a conversation with future Sopranos writer Robin Green about his difficult relationship with his mother, initially imagining it as a feature film starring Robert De Niro and Anne Bancroft before turning it into a TV pilot. All four major networks rejected the premise of a panic-attack-prone mob boss in therapy, and Chase spent years working on shows including The Rockford Files and Northern Exposure before revisiting the project. Realising he had stripped out the death and murder central to mob stories like The Godfather, he added deaths back into the script and repitched it to HBO in 1997, a move that was seen as a career risk at the time given the network's limited series output.